This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Even at the age of six, Judit Polgár was scything a path through Hungary’s chess masters. She won her first tournament in Budapest in 1981. Hungary then was a communist dictatorship. Judit and her parents and two sisters lived in a damp, cramped apartment. Foreign travel was forbidden, and the secret police were always watching, but chess provided a path out of poverty.
The Polgárs’ father Lászlo, a psychologist, believed geniuses were not born, but made. Judit and her sisters Zsuzsa and Zsófia were home-schooled with a curriculum based on chess, with hours of training every day. It worked. Queen of Chess, now showing on Netflix, tells the story of how Judit became a grandmaster at the age of 15 and, eventually, the greatest female chess player of all time.
Judit is an engaging star, often looking back on her tumultuous childhood and early years with a wry, engaging smile. Much of the film revolves around her rivalry with Gary Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster. Director Rory Kennedy drives the story at a whip-crack pace, as she wins tournament after tournament. Yet Queen of Chess often feels two-dimensional.
There is surely a deeper tale to be told, of how Judit and her sisters really felt about their strange, high-pressure childhood, their demanding father, time in the international spotlight and the emotional toll all these must have taken.
Nor is their Jewish heritage examined. In the last few minutes Judit is asked about her relationship with her father and his “experiment”. She smiles, looks upward and laughs. “On the one hand, it is not a nice way of being part of an experiment,” she muses, but the self-reflection soon swerves into everyday banalities. There is clearly much more to explore.
Nowadays celebrity chefs are ten a penny. Few though have the intellectual heft of the man credited as the first of the breed: Antonin Carême, a key architect of French modern cuisine. Carême’s heyday was in the early 19th century, when his clients included kings, Napoleon Bonaparte and, perhaps most usefully, Talleyrand, the serpentine foreign minister.
Loosely based on his life and exploits, Carême, now showing on Apple TV, is a lush, sexy romp unapologetically unfolding in an era of excess, bacchanalia and extreme attention to culinary detail.
The series opens with Carême happily buried between his girlfriend’s thighs together with some whipped cream. Consumption of this dish is happily proceeding to plan, until he is summoned to cook for the army. There he somehow saves Napoleon’s life and is quickly drawn into high-level court intrigues. Each episode pulses with often manic energy, moving from bedroom to kitchen to the corridors of power and back again.
Carême’s elaborate desserts, designed with architectural precision, are used as diplomatic gambits — impressing visiting dignitaries with the glories of French patisserie. The cooking scenes in the enormous kitchens, as legions of underlings prepare multi-course feasts, are beautifully choreographed with rich attention to period detail. The undercurrent of sexual tension with Carême’s assistant Agathe simmers like a pot of bouillon.
Baking, bonking, betrayal, slowly unbuttoned 19th-century bodices — what more could one want from a television drama? Carême is engaging entertainment, with a fine cast, sumptuous settings and some useful cooking tips along the way.
Any visitor to Oslo should make time to see the Resistance Museum. Norway allied with Britain against the Nazis. The country was occupied from 1940 to 1945, but its wartime record is mixed. A government-in-exile operated from London. Resistance networks organised sabotage and assassinations.
But plenty of Norwegians embraced the Nazis’ new order — the word Quisling is taken from the collaborationist leader Vidkun Quisling, eventually executed.
Hundreds of Norwegian Jews were smuggled to Sweden. Hundreds more were sent to Auschwitz. This brief history lesson is useful for appreciating Number 24, a masterful account of life and death in the wartime Norwegian resistance and its ongoing legacy.
The film, showing on Netflix, is based on a true story — the life of Gunnar Sønsteby, a resistance leader. It opens with an elderly Sønsteby giving a speech about his wartime life to a group of young students, one of whom persistently questions him. The story moves back and forth between his presentation and wartime Norway.
Director John Andreas Andersen deftly controls both narrative strands. The atmospheric wartime sections feel deeply authentic. Sjur Vatne Brean delivers a sterling performance as the young Sønsteby. He steadily moves up the ranks of the resistance until he becomes one of their most important agents — even travelling back and forth to Britain on the clandestine boats that operated between Norway and the Shetland Islands.
Sønsteby is a young man, but, unlike some of his comrades, he avoids drinking and women. He trusts almost no one, which helps keep him alive. With the Nazis on his tail, he moves between safe-houses, switching names and identification papers. The menace of everyday life under Nazi occupation and resistance tradecraft is dramatically portrayed. The action and sabotage scenes are nail-biting.
But it is the human cost of taking a life — especially of friends turned Nazi collaborators — that lingers through the decades. Eventually it becomes clear why the narrative moves between wartime Oslo, Sønsteby’s lecture and the young questioner. The final scenes will moisten your eyes.
